by Carolina Simionato (@smntcarolina)
First Encounters is a journey from the very first second. The first track, “Evidence of New Gravitation,” starts off already walking, as if you had been following the sound through large corridors until finally reaching the right one and opening the right door to catch the exact right second of the Spiral Wave Nomads jamming.
Asynchronously making music together over the internet since 2018 — an effort which gave us their self-titled debut LP — bandmates Eric Hardiman and Michael Kiefer met in the flesh for the first time during the summer of 2019. The public record of their first meeting is the four tracks that make up the aptly-named First Encounters, freshly improvised and recorded on just one afternoon in 2019 and co-released on Twin Lakes Records and Feeding Tube Records.
The result of it is chaotically meditational, woven through experimental jams of the perfect length that sound like there must have been more than just Kiefer and Hardiman playing together in the moment — with no overdubbing. It's the outcome of two people who know very well what they’re doing (and how to best work their instruments) roaming together.
Here it is energetic, there calmer; now a bass tone droning over the noise, somewhere else an unexpected sweet melody after minutes of distorted strumming. Noisy and melodic; wintry and warm. There seems to be a third, non-credited instrument here: the room, reverberating sound, feels like a part of it all. Close your eyes and you can almost see it.
There is seamless communication between the drums and guitar, with them sounding both as the staples of modern music they are and anew. The drums provide a foundation for the guitar to fly high, but they are also often heard flying right alongside, humbly showing off just how enthralling drums can be, just in case you didn’t know that already. Though tied to the rhythm, they are free.
Are your eyes open now? Close them again, if you’d like. Picture the two experienced musicians losing themselves together in this jam, even if you don’t know what they look like, because it’s about the feeling of the trance-like moments in these tracks, hypnotically circular until breaking the circle — “Of a Similar Mind” as a whole being the best example of that. Yeah, that’s the stuff that fills figurative hearts.
At some points in the first three tracks, I felt they would have benefited from sounding fuller, like “Of a Similar Mind” steadily does. It’s the “I wish my handlebars had fringes” kind of wish: it all still works more than fine without it, like on “Radiant Drifter,” which I imagine is what the first day of spring sounds like, melting together all the rawness and lightness you are bound to also find within First Encounters.